own.
3
Planetary Clues
F IRST OF ALL, let us mention that the classical concept of our solar system with eight other dead planets and thirty-odd lifeless moons surrounding the living Earth has rapidly changed in the past decade. Scientists are no longer willing to state categorically that there is no life at all on the other planets, even on the coldest and most remote ones.
Jupiter, for instance. This most gigantic of planets, 88,770 miles in equatorial diameter and 484 million miles from the sun, was always thought to be abysmally frigid, somewhere around minus 202°F. But studies with ultraviolet and infrared instruments that could penetrate clouds showed that this low-temperature reading was at a high altitude above the surface, just as Earth's upper air is fantastically cold.
Down below, according to some data, the temperature of Jupiter could be as high as 70°F. In short, like a balmy summer day on Earth. Under such thermal conditions, and with a known “reducing” atmosphere much like that of primeval Earth, there was little reason why life should not have sprung up there too.
In fact, Dr. Carl Sagan, the expert on planets at Cornell, had even postulated the possibility of teeming life there, whose variety of forms and sheer quantity would be hundreds of times greater than on Earth.
With an assist by Pioneer-10's data, Sagan's daring hypothesis may well turn out true. The Pioneer-10 space probe made a flyby of Jupiter on December 3, 1973. Its many sophisticated sensorsdiscovered surprising new phenomena. One of them was that Jupiter's thick atmosphere thins out considerably at lower altitudes because it is boiling hot. In fact, the surface temperature may hit as high as 800°F, as hot as Venus. 1 If the giant planet has any lofty peaks where temperature would drop to reasonable levels, then indeed Jupiter may fairly crawl with life all over its vast surface.
Saturn, too, has gone through such a revision as to its temperature and whether or not it could support life. In 1972, several colleagues of Carl Sagan at Cornell University used the gigantic radio-telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to probe beneath the huge planet's cloudy atmosphere and pick up long radio wavelengths indicating that “Saturn, like Jupiter, is not entirely the frozen wasteland it was once thought to be.” 2 And, furthermore, that “there are areas in Saturn's atmosphere much warmer and possible more conducive to life than scientists have previously thought likely.”
The very latest is that solar-system scientists are now considering whether even remote Uranus, and perhaps such big moons as Titan (Saturn) and Ganymede or Calisto (Jupiter) might not be warm enough to harbor some kind of life, even if primeval.
We must make a point here. If any kind of life, even the lowly lichen, algae, or some other one-celled microorganism, is detected or found anywhere out in space away from Earth, it will instantly make tenable all speculations that the universe is filled with living worlds. And that will make intelligent life of such high probability that it will amount to dead certainty.
Exobiology will then no longer be a set of theories seeking a science.
In passing, we might mention that Venus is not yet to be marked down as so super-hot that no life as we know it can possibly exist there. Even though scientists using radar techniques, and our close-approach space probes (Russian and American), have measured temperatures anywhere from 540°F to above 800°F, they have been careful not to claim that this makes life impossible there.
Some probings have indicated much cooler temperatures in the polar-zones of Venus, where life might still lurk. Or it may be that living creatures, unable to evolve on the furnace-hot surface, instead made their debut in the cool regions of the upper atmosphere. With an estimated atmosphere at least ninety times more dense than Earth's, huge gelatinous creatures could float comfortably in the aerial reaches
3
Planetary Clues
F IRST OF ALL, let us mention that the classical concept of our solar system with eight other dead planets and thirty-odd lifeless moons surrounding the living Earth has rapidly changed in the past decade. Scientists are no longer willing to state categorically that there is no life at all on the other planets, even on the coldest and most remote ones.
Jupiter, for instance. This most gigantic of planets, 88,770 miles in equatorial diameter and 484 million miles from the sun, was always thought to be abysmally frigid, somewhere around minus 202°F. But studies with ultraviolet and infrared instruments that could penetrate clouds showed that this low-temperature reading was at a high altitude above the surface, just as Earth's upper air is fantastically cold.
Down below, according to some data, the temperature of Jupiter could be as high as 70°F. In short, like a balmy summer day on Earth. Under such thermal conditions, and with a known “reducing” atmosphere much like that of primeval Earth, there was little reason why life should not have sprung up there too.
In fact, Dr. Carl Sagan, the expert on planets at Cornell, had even postulated the possibility of teeming life there, whose variety of forms and sheer quantity would be hundreds of times greater than on Earth.
With an assist by Pioneer-10's data, Sagan's daring hypothesis may well turn out true. The Pioneer-10 space probe made a flyby of Jupiter on December 3, 1973. Its many sophisticated sensorsdiscovered surprising new phenomena. One of them was that Jupiter's thick atmosphere thins out considerably at lower altitudes because it is boiling hot. In fact, the surface temperature may hit as high as 800°F, as hot as Venus. 1 If the giant planet has any lofty peaks where temperature would drop to reasonable levels, then indeed Jupiter may fairly crawl with life all over its vast surface.
Saturn, too, has gone through such a revision as to its temperature and whether or not it could support life. In 1972, several colleagues of Carl Sagan at Cornell University used the gigantic radio-telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to probe beneath the huge planet's cloudy atmosphere and pick up long radio wavelengths indicating that “Saturn, like Jupiter, is not entirely the frozen wasteland it was once thought to be.” 2 And, furthermore, that “there are areas in Saturn's atmosphere much warmer and possible more conducive to life than scientists have previously thought likely.”
The very latest is that solar-system scientists are now considering whether even remote Uranus, and perhaps such big moons as Titan (Saturn) and Ganymede or Calisto (Jupiter) might not be warm enough to harbor some kind of life, even if primeval.
We must make a point here. If any kind of life, even the lowly lichen, algae, or some other one-celled microorganism, is detected or found anywhere out in space away from Earth, it will instantly make tenable all speculations that the universe is filled with living worlds. And that will make intelligent life of such high probability that it will amount to dead certainty.
Exobiology will then no longer be a set of theories seeking a science.
In passing, we might mention that Venus is not yet to be marked down as so super-hot that no life as we know it can possibly exist there. Even though scientists using radar techniques, and our close-approach space probes (Russian and American), have measured temperatures anywhere from 540°F to above 800°F, they have been careful not to claim that this makes life impossible there.
Some probings have indicated much cooler temperatures in the polar-zones of Venus, where life might still lurk. Or it may be that living creatures, unable to evolve on the furnace-hot surface, instead made their debut in the cool regions of the upper atmosphere. With an estimated atmosphere at least ninety times more dense than Earth's, huge gelatinous creatures could float comfortably in the aerial reaches
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